Congress Travels The World On Our Dime

While the rest of Congress was struggling to avoid the dreaded fiscal cliff late last year, then-Sen. John Kerry whisked off to London with a top aide. It was a classic farewell trip for a veteran Democrat about to become Americaâs next secretary of state.

What wasnât classic was the cost to taxpayers: $17,500 for two airline tickets to London that normally cost just $3,000.

Across the Capitol, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor commandeered a VIP military flight and dashed off to Switzerland with half-dozen Republican colleagues in late January, just days after a congressional vote to suspend the debt limit and avert another fiscal crisis. The jaunt - for a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos - likely set back taxpayers more than $50,000.

And not to be outdone by their jet-setting bosses, more than a dozen congressional staffers from both political parties took a winter trip to sunny, warm Las Vegas at the expense of special interests Their weighty assignment? Check out the gadgets at the city's annual consumer electronics expo.

While most in Washington have been preaching the gospel of fiscal discipline, members of Congress and their top aides have done little to rein in their own travel in the face of the sequester budget cuts and soon-approaching national debt ceiling, a Washington Guardian review of travel records found. In fact, they've been spending more on travel than in prior years.

Members of Congress and their staffers spent $1.45 million on official taxpayer trips in 2012, up about $230,000 from the year before. And in the first three months of 2013, lawmakers and staff took another $800,000 in trips at the expense of special interests, nearly $100,000 more than the same period last year, according to the official travel records compiled by Congress and stored on the PoliticalMoneyLine.com site.

Well, Obama sets the tone. He and/or his wife take a vacation every month seemingly. Or send their two kids on soem expensive tax-payer funded vacation.

Former Sec. of Defense and congressman Leon Panetta used to use a military jet to go home to california every single week at an astronomical cost to taxpayers. Congress was almost completely uninterested in this outrageous display of entitlement.

Kerry was the richest man in the Senate, courtesy of his wife. Still, he expects the taxpayer to pick up the tab for his jaunts.

This really is the tip of the iceberg. The federal bureaucracy wastes billion son unnecessary travel. Remember the GSA scandal about their lavish off-sites? That's par for the course for these drones. They regularly have lavish meetings at expensive resort venues. You can guess how much actual work gets done.

Well, Obama sets the tone. He and/or his wife take a vacation every month seemingly. Or send their two kids on soem expensive tax-payer funded vacation.

Former Sec. of Defense and congressman Leon Panetta used to use a military jet to go home to california every single week at an astronomical cost to taxpayers. Congress was almost completely uninterested in this outrageous display of entitlement.

Kerry was the richest man in the Senate, courtesy of his wife. Still, he expects the taxpayer to pick up the tab for his jaunts.

This really is the tip of the iceberg. The federal bureaucracy wastes billion son unnecessary travel. Remember the GSA scandal about their lavish off-sites? That's par for the course for these drones. They regularly have lavish meetings at expensive resort venues. You can guess how much actual work gets done.

So they close the WH to tourists to save money.

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Eliminating this kind of waste alone would make a big dent in balancing the budget. That is if congress/Odumbo had any interest in doing so. Which they don't.